What makes a great cog neuro program?

[AllThingsBrain]

Hi all,

I'm a first-year PhD student in a cognitive psychology program. I know I want to do cog neuro, and I'm surprised how much of a stretch that is seeming to be in this program. No professors in the department are working with brain scans, and I'm being referred to undergraduate classes and transfer classes to pick up the skills I want in fMRI analysis and computational neuroscience. My advisor is very supportive, and I'm grateful--but I'm also starting to get concerned about all the things I'm not learning by osmosis, and I am starting to get pushed to make my research more about cognitive tests and less about brain scans, which isn't the direction I want to go.

I wonder if I'd feel just as 'mismatched' in a neuro program because I'd be forced to learn too much about mouse methods (not a technique I will use in my research about individual variation in human cognition) and generally deeper bio than I need. But I do want to have some understanding of neurobiology (a little more than I came in with) and some stronger knowledge of how drugs work in the brain, too (but I don't think I should be in a psychiatry program). I get the impression some neuro programs just don't want cog neuro students.

Is anyone in a program you feel is great for doing cog neuro? What about the program structure and content makes it that way? Are there still course requirements that don't seem relevant for cog neuro?

Edited February 28, 2020 by AllThingsBrain